Poetry
Stanko, Mary Rudbeck
"Dragnet" has turned into Alien or Predator or The Exorcist. And director Jonathan Demme has turned into William Friedkin or Ken Russel. I have always valued Demme's films (Something Wild, Melvin...
...Joseph Ruben is not a relentless director...
...Is it because his exertions make him breathe as furiously as an engine...
...Bergin smilingly agrees, politely excuses himself, enters the house, punches Roberts to the floor, and kicks her in the stomach...
...she straightens the towels...
...I suppose I should admire Demme's versatility, but how can I applaud when a vital artist turns into an efficient ghoul...
...Then she opens a cupboard and puts all the cans inside into orderly little groups...
...Cut to the cocktail party...
...Her husband (Patrick Bergin), dressed for the office, comes up and embraces her...
...He is a very happy man...
...RICHARD ALLEVA 5 April 1991:227...
...That night, he brings her an expensive present...
...But he feels it to the point where any sign of spontaneity on the part of his beloved wife--a casual glance at a stranger, a bit of sloppy housekeeping---becomes an affront to his sense of possession...
...There is nothing in Silence of the Lambs as terrifying as the first fifteen minutes of Sleeping with the Enemy...
...But nothing shakes our interest in the story or characters, either...
...Once a filmmaker achieves a certain amount of reality, there's no need to reach for the tube of purple blood...
...He looks across a crowded room at her, his eyes brimming with love...
...Julia blithely counters that the red dress may be too skimpy for this cold weather...
...She seems suddenly tremulous but he regards the mess affably and goes offto change...
...The yachtsman remarks that he's often passed by the house, has once noticed the wife at a window, and considers Bergin quite a lucky man...
...So, when violence breaks out in this very human world, it is more shocking than anything in the sweaty freak-show landscape of Silence of the Lambs...
...And, sure enough, that night they make love passionately...
...For owning such a great house, that is...
...I n Sleeping with the Enemy, knots are tied in order to be cut...
...The villain here is a monster, but not an unmotivated killing machine...
...Now he has made a movie that is more like a traffic accident than an entertainment...
...His idea of love is to turn the loved one into a component of himself...
...Something unpleasant stirs in us despite the loveliness of the morning sky...
...In a review of William Burroughs's Naked Lunch, Norman Mailer put his finger on that novel's central flaw: After reading three hundred pages of surrealistic atrocities, the reader begins to wonder if there will be purple blood in the next rape...
...Outside, her husband chats with a fellow yachtsman who is joining them for an outing...
...She's wearing the red dress...
...The horror mounts until it bursts and catharsis is achieved...
...None of the rest of the movie--Roberts's escape from this marital nightmare, Bergin's pursuit of her, Roberts's discovery of true love with a young drama teacher, and the lrmal showdown between husband and wife--achieves the power of that first quarter of an hour...
...Then along comes a movie like Sleeping with the Enemy which has only three brief moments of conventional violence but which keeps viewers riveted throughout its running time...
...The couple dress for an important cocktail party, and he notes with mild disappointment that she isn't wearing the red dress he likes so much...
...Yet, for most of that quarter of an hour we see nothing more than the portrait of a seemingly happy marriage...
...Yet she still seems slightly shaken...
...I have always valued Demme's films (Something Wild, Melvin andHoward) for their spontaneity and looseness...
...Each new work must up the ante of brutality...
...It ties knots in our stomachs and then ties knots in the knots...
...He doesn't pound us with scary music, end every scene on a sinister note, photograph his actors to look like escapees from a Diane Arbus exhibit (though he does include one shot of Bergin drinking from a water fountain that makes him look like a predatory fish...
...But why does she look at him so uncertainly the next morning when he does his calisthenics...
...He is possessed by an emotion almost all of us have felt at some time: possessive love...
...And when that component malfunctions, he must snap it into place...
...The world of Sleeping with the Enemy includes smalltown idyllicism, sweet love scenes, moments of tenderness between a mother and daughter...
...That is now the problem with nearly all horror-suspense films...
...He knows his wife and her little needs so well...
...A splash of the usual red will do very nicely...
...She seems to be doing this in a state of near-panic...
...The film plays fair with its characters and with us...
...Julia Roberts walks idyllically along a Cape Cod beach collecting clamshells...
...She thanks him for the correction...
...He points this out to her...
...After washing up, he notices that the bathroom towels are not hanging in alignment on the towel rack...
...Her sandy hands dirty his suit...
Vol. 118 • April 1991 • No. 7
